


like a crash test car

by endquestionmark



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Blood, Dominance, F/M, Knifeplay, M/M, Multi, Other, Submission, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-07
Updated: 2013-11-07
Packaged: 2017-12-31 18:12:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re bleeding,” Fitz says idly. He’s splintered across five different screens right now, two of which are hanging in front of his eyes and making him see everything double. Not on purpose, but it’s not his fault he can’t reprogram his eyes to move independently. Simmons could, probably, but that’s not a topic he’s particularly enthusiastic about broaching. She would probably change her mind halfway through and add a few extra lenses or something, and enhanced vision isn’t exactly something he’s a huge fan of at the moment. Enough artificial eyes nearly blowing your fingers off can do that, and in this case “enough” means one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a crash test car

**Author's Note:**

> So once upon a time I watched Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and complained loudly on Twitter about how much more attractive Ward would be beaten up and making really small pained noises and bleeding all over the place, and then I started writing fic about my favorite two adorable genius babs, and then I decided to throw in knifeplay just because. And then, as all things do, it spiraled. Written while listening to [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSfKSUd31MM) on endless repeat.
> 
> Warnings for knifeplay, weapons, blood, and dominance/submission; as per reader suggestion, warnings also for unsafe kink and cut-to-black before aftercare.

“You’re bleeding,” Fitz says idly. He’s splintered across five different screens right now, two of which are hanging in front of his eyes and making him see everything double. Not on purpose, but it’s not his fault he can’t reprogram his eyes to move independently. Simmons could, probably, but that’s not a topic he’s particularly enthusiastic about broaching. She would probably change her mind halfway through and add a few extra lenses or something, and enhanced vision isn’t exactly something he’s a huge fan of at the moment. Enough artificial eyes nearly blowing your fingers off can do that, and in this case “enough” means one.

Ward is sitting on one of their lab stools, spinning one of the gyroscopes Fitz pulled out of the ruins of Amador’s eyes. Simmons had explained that it was for image stabilization, idly smearing vitreous humor across the dissection tray, shiny and speckled with charred organic matter. “The eye, you see,” she’d said, “it jumps about much more than you’d think. Take you, looking at this table.” She’d waved a gloved hand through the space between them. Fitz hadn’t leaned away, but he’d been uncomfortably aware of the wet shine on the tips of her fingers. “You can’t see all of it at once - your field of view isn’t large enough, not with your eyes staying still - so you look at little discrete parts, and then your brain stitches them together into a composite. And then you can extrapolate from your peripheral vision, once you’ve got that initial impression. So really the footage from this -“ she held up the camera’s body, the stump of the optical nerve an abbreviated pendulum “- should have been far more shaky-cam, but _voilà_!” She held up something black, made amorphous by congealing ocular fluid. “Gyroscopes! Ingenious. Necessary, of course. But ingenious.”

“Ingenious,” Fitz had echoed, strangely hypnotized by the way the transparent fluid had lengthened into a drip, hanging far too long before it fell back into the tray, where it did not ripple.

He wonders now if he should tell Ward about the provenance of the little sphere with which he seems to be playing one-marble bools, but decides that between the thread of red slowly seeping through his shirt at the shoulder and the way he freezes at the mention that Ward has probably got enough to worry about as it is. Ward does have a tell, for all that he is a very, very good agent and probably at least fifty percent robot; even when he’s safe, and among friends, and also _on a plane of friends_ , he’s inclined to be a void (of personality, of emotion, of a lot of things, but). He goes completely still - more so than someone asleep, or daydreaming, and in a more pointed way than most corpses Fitz has met, and just for a fraction of a second - and then ticks back into motion, like finicky clockwork.

“Thanks,” says Ward, sending the gyroscope wobbling into the caltrop-pile of Fitz’s torx and screwdrivers. “There goes another shirt.”

Another _white t-shirt_ , Fitz thinks, _who cares_ , and wonders, not for the first time, why they couldn’t have gotten somebody a little less mechanical as their lead agent. Not that he’s opposed to mechanical, obviously - a good three-fifths of his brain is still dedicated to the tablet in his lap, and the laptop in front of him, and then the screen projected around that through the surface of the table - but there’s something to be said for a little humanity. Even a little fallibility.

“No interesting story for this particular battle wound?” Fitz says, and Ward does it again, freezes like a cat caught by the light switch.

“Nothing that wouldn’t disappoint,” Ward says, rubbing at the bloodstain and wincing at the presumable tug of raw flesh, and flips Fitz a half-arsed salute, pushing his stool under the bench as he goes.

Fitz has the strangest feeling that he’s lying.

++

“Ward was bleeding all over the lab earlier,” he says to Simmons later that night. They’re at the in-flight bar, which is a bit of a misnomer because while it _is_ an in-flight bar, it’s also an out-of-flight bar, a taxiing-down-the-runway bar, and a two-in-the-morning-and-in-need-of-inspiration bar. Simmons is doing something awful with whipped cream to some really quite nice coffee liqueur, while Fitz has opted for a greyhound, because he’s too self-aware to drink screwdrivers but he really does like vodka and citrusy drinks. They help him clear his head.

“All over,” she says, tilting her head a few degrees too far for the amount of muddy terror still in her glass. “I didn’t see any - did it evaporate?” The terrible thing is that he knows she isn’t being sarcastic, or doing it to badger him, but because she honestly does want to know if it evaporated. “It didn’t do that last time.”

The sentence hangs, and Fitz wants to complete it - last time he bled all over the gurney, last time he got a nosebleed an hour after the plane violently depressurized, last time he accidentally grabbed a scalpel by the wrong end. There are a lot of possibilities. Fitz is frankly surprised he and SImmons haven’t personally redecorated the lab in a similarly sanguine manner yet. Given the amount of dangerous alien technology (or enemy technology, or ally technology, frankly) they use as coasters or doorstops at any given moment, anybody in the lab has about a seventy-five percent chance of exploding for no good reason.

He takes another sip of grapefruit - he can barely taste the vodka, which means he’s doing something wrong - and ventures a possibility. Fitz has never liked leaving things half-finished and therefore starts as many projects as possible, in a sort of preemptive penance for the inevitable incomplete concepts he leaves in his wake. “When he tripped and that _gladius_ was hanging off the edge of the table?”

“Nope,” Simmons says, and then tries it again: “Noooope.” She pops the final “p” between glossed lips, and Fitz thinks of the latex-blue of her fingertips, slicked through the remains of someone’s _eye, for god’s sake_ , and tries to make that feel as discordant as it should be, and utterly fails. He wants to wipe away the specks of whipped cream just below her lower lip. She’s told him the word for that - mentolabial sulcus - and for the crease just below one’s nose - philtrum - and in return he’s tried his best to pull himself together onto one screen long enough to explain exactly how a distributed denial-of-service attack works, and what exactly Stuxnet was and how _that_ worked. Words and knowledge are what they deal in, and how they deal with the world. When you look the way Fitz and Simmons do - because that’s not something either of them are inclined to deny; after all, _know thyself_ \- and when you are ten years old and have run out of medical textbooks to read, or dial-up on which to experiment, you learn very quickly that being in possession of all the facts is not just an advantage but an imperative. Fitz wants to know if her lips would be slippery, like vitreous humor, or the sticky sweetness of lipgloss, topped with a cocktail that probably contains so much sugar it should be a solid, by all rights.

He snags her glass, sniffing at it cautiously, and makes a moue. It really _does_ smell alarmingly saccharine. “Well, don’t leave us hanging, then,” he says, “throw us a bone, do?” The drink is sweeter than he smells, and he winces hard, hastily sliding it back along the bar to her and reaching for his own glass to wash the taste away. She laughs at him, tapping her fingers up along the stem of her glass, and smiles, showing all her teeth. It turns her mouth into an inverted Cupid’s bow, an uninhibited grin, and Fitz involuntarily smiles at that, one side of his mouth tugging up. He takes another sip to cover it, because there’s camaraderie and then there’s professionalism, even in SHIELD. (He’s seen the way Coulson smiles at May sometimes. He’s no expert on body language - he doesn’t know if it’s nostalgia, or wistfulness, or something he simply can’t describe - but he does know that he doesn’t want to be that person, in ten years, who looks at their coworker and breaks the hearts of everyone who sees it.

“We _were_ actually going to tell you,” Simmons says, with a confessional air.

“Were you now.” This doesn’t actually clarify much. It could mean anything from _I accidentally stabbed him when he was too quiet in the kitchen and I was looking in the cupboard_ to _the other day he tripped over your stool and a ruler happened_. Fitz suppresses the frisson of intrigue that curls its way up his spine at her tone, and looks at her in the shifting low light and the barely-audible mechanical hum of the plane, and drinks, and looks, and drinks.

“Well, yes,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “We are Fitz and Simmons, after all, aren’t we? Fitzsimmons? But yes. You seemed like you’d be interested. You did see through his shirt all the way across the room, didn’t you.”

“It bled through,” Fitz says, because he believes in precision in all things, as well as mitigating just how odd what she’s saying should be. “I didn’t see _through_ his shirt.”

“Well, excuse me,” she says. “We just like to play.” She takes a sip from her martini glass, looking up at him over the rim, gauging his reaction. “With knives, occasionally.”

“We,” he begins to ask, and realizes that this isn’t about Fitzsimmons, this isn’t about the _we_ he’s been a part of ever since he was taken out of class in university and sat down in a small room with no windows and a mild-mannered, slightly less tired-looking man at a metal desk in the middle. This is a different _we_ , but one he’s been invited to be part of nonetheless. He settles for a different question. “Knives?”

“It’s all very sanitary,” she promises, eyes going wide, nearly flinging her drink out of the glass in her haste to reassure him. “Scalpel blades, you know! The individually packaged sort.” She set her glass down. “I suppose it’s a bit strange that we order them in for work, but we do get so many. It’s like pipette tips.”

He holds up a finger on his own lips, and she babbles her way to a stop. “Sorry,” she says, voice pitched a little lower and softer. “I do that when I’m nervous, you know.”

“I do know,” he says, and inclines his head, raising his eyebrows. _Take a breath._

She does, and then another, and rolls her shoulders back. “Take time to think about it,” she says. “Do some research with a sixth of your brain, I think, that would be good, right?” She looks into the middle distance just over his right shoulder and nods a bit. “That would definitely be good. And really do take your time. It’s not an offer with an expiration.”

“Thank you,” Fitz says, “I will,” because it’s true. He’s intrigued and he’s certainly not averse, and if he doesn’t lead with that he thinks Simmons will possibly run out of breath and then hyperventilate. He reaches for her glass, pausing halfway there, and says “May I?” She nods. “This, however, probably expired about two years ago and should never have been summoned from the past. If I may, I’m going to tip it down the sink and get you some water and we’re going to watch Fawlty Towers until I try to use you as a pillow, and then you are to drink more water and go to bed, and I will sleep on the sofa. All right?”

“All right,” she says, “but make it Black Books instead,” and he laughs and tips the hideous cocktail into the sink under the bar, filling two glasses with water and tucking them (along with the remains of his greyhound) under his arm.

“Lead the way,” he says, and she does.

++

“Jemma talked to you,” Ward says out of nowhere the next morning. Fitz swears a great deal under his breath and removes his hand from the cupboard, looking ruefully at a half-eaten and now completely flattened packet of biscuits.

“You’ve got to stop doing that!” he says indignantly. “I could have been holding a knife. I could have _stabbed_ you.” Fitz stumbles to a stop. Ward, because he has a sense of humor written into his subroutines somewhere, raises an eyebrow and smiles very, very slightly and very, very slowly.

“Could you have?” Ward says, because most of those subroutines are devoted to making him a stonefaced bastard.

“Yes I could!” Fitz retorts. “If you startled me. And not in a fun way at _all_.”

Ward nods a little and rummages around under the sink for one of the many mugs they keep there - Fitz swears they’re breeding, really, there’s no way a closed environment would have so many on purpose - and, for the first time, Fitz lets himself look. Just a little.

Ward is generically good-looking the way most Hellenistic art is - he’s nice to look at, but has all the sex appeal of a head of cabbage. In the Amador operation, when they’d given him x-ray glasses (and really, x-ray glasses, Fitz thought most people got over that in primary school) he’d actually looked like a real person, which had been an infinite improvement. Now, though, Fitz watches Ward stir sugar into his coffee and wonders if it’s the thrill of risk that does it for Ward. He wonders what would happen if he traced a thumb over the pulse that surfaces just under the hinge of Ward’s jaw, pressing just hard enough to feel the systole and diastole. He wonders about rope. They’ve got some very nice soft cotton line in the lockers for rigging up pulleys and so on, but then maybe that isn’t Ward’s style. Maybe he prefers rope that leaves marks.

It’s like being hit by a train, really, realizing that there’s more to Ward than unconscious machismo and a tendency to play by the rules a bit too much. It makes one think. Fitz looks, and thinks, and then Ward straightens up and raises his eyebrows at him, and of course Fitz tries to look at about thirteen different things at once, none of them Ward. “Can I help you?” Ward asks.

“You could get the bloody coffee down,” Fitz says, because he’s already smashed one packet of biscuits and that’s enough unintentional property damage for one day, really. (Intentional property damage is a different matter entirely.)

Ward does it, but with the air of someone helping a small child — he’s either the smuggest bastard ever to walk the earth, or trying to be sympathetic and failing entirely. Fitz stares at the way Ward’s shirt rides up, and the way his waist looks when he twists to reach into the back of the cupboard, and when he looks up again Ward is holding the coffee out and smirking. Definitely a smug bastard, then.

“Thanks,” Fitz says anyway, and turns away to drag out the coffeemaker, and by the time he’s got it plugged in Ward is gone.

++

“I’m interested,” he says to Simmons, later that afternoon.

She looks surprised. “Are you sure? That was a bit quick, wasn’t it? Really, we won’t be offended if you say no! It’s fine!”

“Do you not want me to say yes, then,” Fitz says, “because that’s fine too, I mean —“

“No!” Simmons says. “No, I mean, we’d. No, that’s fine! I just wanted to check.”

“Then yes,” Fitz says. “Yes, whenever you want. No expiry, like you said.”

She smiles, and he lets himself look, and it’s like being hit by a train all over again.

++

“Gemma’s room, twenty one hundred hours tonight,” Ward says.

“Are you _serious_ ,” Fitz says, “are you actually incapable of talking like a human being? Must you always be the good agentbot?”

“Come and see,” Ward says, and Fitz knows his eyes have gone wide, and he’s staring, and he can’t stop, and Ward laughs a little, one side of his mouth crooked up in a smile, and Leo Fitz’s life is so strange, and _utterly amazing_.

++

“You need a safeword,” Simmons says. She’s sitting on her bed, leaning on the headboard with her knees drawn up under her tunic. She picks at lint on the knee of her leggings. “In case you want us to stop or if you want to leave or anything. We need to know.”

“Chitauri,” Fitz says, because he’s. Because he’s thought about this sort of thing — admittedly not the specifics, but the generalities — quite extensively before, if truth be told. When one grows up with as much spare mental capacity as he and Simmons did, one thinks about a lot of things. One thinks about _everything_.

“Well, it’s a bit good to know you’re not likely to say _that_ accidentally,” Simmons says. “And for the record mine is telomerase, and Ward’s is —“

“Quantum,” Ward says, closing and locking the door behind himself. “Because I hold a grudge against high school physics.”

“But not apparently against jokes,” Fitz marveled. “You’re quite different under the knife.”

“Everyone is,” Simmons says, and smiles. It’s a different smile from her usual effervescent one —more honed, somehow; more dangerous; sharper. “The scene starts now, Leo.”

“Yes,” Leo finds himself saying.

“Yes, _ma’am _,” she says, and he echoes her.__

__“I want you leaning up against the headboard,” she says, “with your back to it and your knees up,” and he complies. “Grant, clothes.”_ _

__“Ma’am,” Grant says, which. Admittedly he calls people _sir_ and _ma’am_ on a pretty regular basis, but it’s different. This isn’t just a formality; this has layers upon layers of meaning and trust. He unbuttons his shirt and steps out of his jeans — he’s already barefoot, which is strangely appealing, in the sense that it speaks to a sort of intimacy one usually only enjoys in one’s home — and then he’s naked, standing utterly unselfconscious in the middle of Simmons’ bedroom._ _

__“Take a look,” Simmons says, and it takes Fitz a moment to realize that she’s talking to him. “Like what you see?”_ _

__He _does_ — Grant isn’t overly musclebound, but he’s spare, built like a runner with broad shoulders and an improbable waist, but what Fitz really notes is the lines spreading across the curves of his shoulders like epaulettes. They’re faint pink, more light scratches than anything, but a few are the darker red of dried blood._ _

__“Grant, Fitz saw you bleeding,” Simmons said. “You made a mess.”_ _

__“Sorry, sir,” Grant says. “Sorry, ma’am.”_ _

__“Wrong order,” she says brusquely. “Who comes first?”_ _

__“You do, ma’am,” Grant says, and for all the formality being thrown around, it’s as if the tension is slowly being leached out of the room._ _

__“Get on the bed,” Simmons says. “Lie back, between his legs. Leo, hold his wrists to the bed.”_ _

__Fitz almost laughs at that, because he’s fairly sure Ward could hold both his wrists in one hand if he tried, but he looks at Simmons’ face and the thoughts go right out of his head. He’s half-hard, and when Ward lies back against him the warmth and pressure of it make his hips jerk. Simmons smiles at that. “You can rub off against his back, if you like,” she says. “Would you like that, Grant?”_ _

__Grant nods, eyes half-closed._ _

__“He’s yours,” she says. “Do what you want. But leave _this_ to me,” she adds, and holds up a packet of scalpel blades, wrapped in green and silver foil. Ward is hard without having even been touched, but he’s holding still, not even straining against Fitz’s fingers around his wrists._ _

__“Yes, ma’am,” Fitz says, a little hesitant about the title, but she nods._ _

__“Good,” she says. “You’re learning. Now watch.”_ _

__She snaps on a pair of blue gloves and opens her nightstand drawer, pulling out a tray lined with blue plastic-cotton, and a neat row of scalpel handles, and expertly snaps a blade onto one of them, discarding the foil wrapper in the drawer._ _

__“You could give us away,” she says to Ward, “if something like that happens again. This time, I’m going to have to make sure you don’t. All right?”_ _

__“Yes ma’am,” Ward says, and she smiles._ _

__“Good,” she says, and crawls onto the bed, tapping on Grant’s legs with the hand not holding the scalpel. He obligingly opens them, and she sits cross-legged between them, head tilted a little to the side._ _

__“Here,” she decides, drawing a line along his inner thigh with her index finger. “Right above your femoral artery. If I stabbed you, you know, at an angle, you’d be dead in three minutes. Unconscious in thirty seconds. How’s that for a thought?”_ _

__Ward moves for the first time since he lay down, tilting his head back into Fitz’s chest, and his throat bobs as he swallows. “Quite something, ma’am,” he manages, roughly, and the sound rumbles through Fitz’s torso._ _

__“Good,” she says again, and draws the scalpel across his skin. She doesn’t press down much, from what Fitz can tell, but the skin parts — barely — and a line of red wells up. “Beautiful,” she says. “Look at that.”_ _

__“Yes, ma’am,” Ward says, voice tense and desperate, and his back is arched now, pressing against Fitz’s cock through his trousers, and Fitz leans back as well, head bumping into the wall._ _

__“How many more, do you think?” Simmons says, looking up at Fitz. “Seven or eight should do it, don’t you think?”_ _

__Ward makes a choked-off noise, hips twitching upwards, and he presses back harder against Fitz. “Yes,” he half-says, half-moans, and adds hurriedly “ma’am.”_ _

__“You heard him,” she says to Ward. “Seven more. And I’ll add one for every noise you make.”_ _

__When she makes the second cut, Ward digs his fingers into the sheets and twists them into whorls; when she makes the third cut, he strains hard against Fitz’s grip, but not hard enough to overwhelm him. By the sixth cut, Ward has gone absolutely still and boneless against Fitz, enough heat pouring off of him to be noticeable in the otherwise rarefied air of Simmons’ room; Fitz is rolling his hips against the small of Ward’s back nearly continuously, looking down at the blood beading on his inner thighs in neat rows and the swift rise-and-fall of his chest. Ward’s eyes are fluttering closed, dark and come-hither, and Simmons cuts an eighth line along the length of his thigh and he gasps._ _

__“What did I say,” Simmons says._ _

__“Sorry,” Ward gasps, “sorry, ma’am, sorry —“_ _

__“But since you apologize so nicely,” she finishes, “I’ll let it slide. Look at you, all cut-up and bloody for me, aren’t you gorgeous? You know what would look wonderful, Fitz?”_ _

__“What, then,” Fitz says, breathless._ _

__“I think he’d look amazing sucking you off,” Simmons says. “All in favor — and all allowed to speak — say aye.”_ _

__“Aye,” says Fitz, “are you _serious_ —“_ _

__And then he stops talking at all, because Ward rolls over in his lap and slides down to undo the buttons of his trousers, and he takes Fitz in his mouth and slides down until Fitz’s cock is bumping the back of his throat, and _hums_._ _

__Fitz would be embarrassed about how quickly he comes after that, but apparently despite his laconism Ward really does know what to do with his mouth when he comes down to it._ _

__“There,” Simmons says from her desk chair as Ward swallows, “see, I was right.”_ _

__“You were,” Fitz says, “I’ve got to grant you that one.”_ _

__“I’m _always_ right,” she says smugly, vestiges of her usual exuberance returning. “Grant, rub yourself off against the sheets.”_ _

__“I can take care of that,” Fitz says, “ma’am,” and she looks at him consideringly for a moment, and then nods. “Come here, then,” he says to Ward, “lean back again,” and he brings Ward off with his hand, one arm wrapped around his chest to hold him still even as he squirms and writhes and his hips jump._ _

__“I don’t suppose either of you considered me,” Simmons says, and the edge to her voice is back — the one that says _listen_._ _

__“Ma’am,” Ward says, and climbs off the bed, going to his knees between her legs, and she looks down at him in surprised delight. “May I?” he says._ _

__“May you,” she says, pretending to consider. “Well, you make quite a compelling argument. You may.”_ _

__Fitz watches it all, languid and loose and fucked-out; he watches the way she lets her head fall back, and he listens to the noises she makes when Ward curls his fingers just so, and he watches her legs over his shoulders and her hands in his hair, tugging, and the way, when she comes, that she rolls her hips forward again and again, making small breathless noises that he wants to kiss away, holding them in his mouth like smoke, like treasure. Ward carries her to the bed when he’s done, and she curls around him like a comma, arms around his neck._ _

__“And cut,” he murmurs._ _

__“Pardon?” Simmons says, voice rough and low in a way he’s not used to and would very much like to _get_ used to._ _

__“End scene,” he explains, and it takes a moment, but she laughs, and Ward groans in mortification, and Fitz grins with success. The room is overheated now, and the bed is too small for two, let alone three, and the sheets are an absolute disaster, and he never wants to get up, and he never wants to leave. He rolls away from them, though, to give them space, he supposes._ _

__“Where are you going,” Simmons whines. “Stay?”_ _

__He does._ _


End file.
